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Track and Search FriendFeed Updates with Alert Thingy
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 12:03 AM on April 15, 2008
Windows/Mac/Linux with Adobe AIR: Keep updates on all your friends' social network activities with Alert Thingy, an application for Adobe's AIR platform that brings FriendFeed functionality to the desktop. We've shown that social aggregator site FriendFeed can make it faster and easier to keep tabs on friends, and while you could track those updates with a private RSS feed, Alert Thingy lets you keep it in an buddy-list-like window, available for quick browsing and, best of all, searching. If you can't keep yourself from digging through your various social memberships to see what's new, Alert Thingy might at least make it quicker to do so. Alert Thingy is a free download for Adobe's AIR platform, which runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
Jared Goralnick
Posted 12:22 AM 15/4/08
AlertThingy is awesome--really making FriendFeed useful/usable. One kink so far that I've experienced is that if a new FriendFeed notification comes in while you're commenting you lose the comment.
Overall it's much like Twhirl. I hope we keep seeing these AIR applications--they're really usable and they just seem much nicer than Java when it comes to portability.
Jared Goralnick
sceo
Posted 2:24 AM 15/4/08
Yeah, where's the Linux love? I downloaded and installed the Adobe AIR for Linux Alpha, so now I want to download the application manually but Howard Baines won't let me! Post back if anyone can make the download available elsewise.
sceo
juanfgs
Posted 2:11 AM 15/4/08
It seems that Adobe AIR doesn't run on linux yet.It says"Adobe AIR not available for your system".
Running Firefox 3 beta 4 on Fedora 8.
juanfgs
xxdesmus
Posted 2:47 AM 15/4/08
They need to give us an option for transparency because right now it's almost unusable considering how transparent it is. It's a decent start, but it certainly needs a lot of work.
xxdesmus
engtech
Posted 3:26 AM 15/4/08
For the Firefoxers in the crowd, [ffapps.com] has all of your Greasemonkey goodness for Friend Feed.
I've personally done 9 scripts for it.
engtech
WiseSalesman
Posted 8:26 AM 15/4/08
I don't use FriendFeed, due to the lack of support for LiveJournal and Facebook, which most of my friends use. Where's the love?
WiseSalesman
WiseSalesman
Posted 8:36 AM 15/4/08
Whoops, my bad there is Facebook support (although, as far as I can tell it requires you to add all friends automatically ... um, no). Still no LJ, though.
WiseSalesman
MarkONeill
Posted 11:27 AM 15/4/08
I have to say I was distinctly unimpressed.
1) You can't change the colours or the fonts. The dark background with the small font makes it difficult to read the updates if you have bad eyesight like I do.
2) There's no option to have the application "on top" of all other windows (which makes it hard to monitor the app if you're surfing the net).
3) It also appears to be quite buggy - for example, I disabled the sounds several times but the sounds kept coming.
4) There's no option to disable the notification windows. It also alerts you to your OWN updates with no option to opt out. What's the point of being notified of something you just wrote yourself?
4) You also have problems re-sizing the box. You can pull the box OUT easily enough but you can only push the box IN a certain way before it jams. People with limited screen space will find this deeply irritating.
But I suppose it's early days so I will continue to keep an eye on it.
MarkONeill
wrxsti
Posted 11:26 AM 15/4/08
cannibal ox is amazing. if you like him look up c rayz, i've seen him live and it was intense.
wrxsti
sebf
Posted 10:20 PM 15/4/08
I hope it works better than when the author demoed it at Adobe on AIR Tour in London last Wednesday.
As he failed to notice that he wasn't connected to the Internet unsurprisingly it didn't work, but bizarrely there were no error messages saying that he needed to be connected to the Internet!
sebf